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Monday, April 23, 2012

Apologies for the long radio silence. And thanks to those of you who sent kind inquiries about my absence. All is well at the homestead. While spring is always a busy season that gets in the way of writing, that's not my excuse this time. The difference now is that my husband is more or less retired, and thus home all the time. This is almost entirely a good thing. The only exception to that is my habit of writing when I have the house entirely to myself. The writing "mood," as it were, comes to me most easily in solitude. I find it very hard to reach that state with distractions around me. So, if this blog is to continue, I'll need to figure out a routine or a method that will provide verisimilitude for being alone at home. This will probably be a challenge, but I'll work at it. If I manage to find time to write, it'll probably mean I find a way to catch up with many of your blogs as well. I've missed keeping tabs on what many of you are up. There's so much inspiration and so many cool ideas in the gardening/homesteading blogosphere!

In the meantime I should provide some thumbnail sketches of where we're at and what we've been doing. First off, my husband's "retirement" is really the loss of a job. Since we've known this was coming for quite a while, we could plan for it, which I know is an advantage many people don't get. Forewarned is forearmed, as they say. Our advance notice let us, just barely, pay off our mortgage entirely before his employment ended. So we are now without an income, but also debt-free. Mostly that's not scary at this point. It feels pretty good, I have to tell you. We've taken a few extra efforts here and there to shave expenses in an already pretty frugal existence.

We've already hosted a number of WWOOF volunteers this year, and our first one brought with him an impressive amount of construction experience. He helped us build a new mobile chicken coop to replace our clunky and deteriorating pen and coop system, which served honorably, if inelegantly, these past four years. The new rig is an A-frame that provides a bit more area to the chickens and should require almost no cleaning, ever, since there's no floor. All the poop ends up directly on the lawn. The girls seem to have taken to it quite happily. I think it's just about the most awesome chicken coop ever, if I say so myself. I'll try to get a detailed post on this one up soon. (Yes, I know my track record with "soon" is execrable.)

Other recent efforts have entailed a lot of digging and planting of rootstock. The hedgerow project got moved way up the priority list by last year's Halloween snowstorm from hell. The storm took out a major section of our fence in the backyard. We're going with the strategy of leaving what remains of the old wooden fence where it is, and replacing what came down with livestock panels and the plants that will form the hedgerow. Frankly, this looks ugly at the moment, and doesn't provide any of the privacy of the wooden fence. But eventually, the livestock panels will be mostly hidden by the plants, which will give us privacy, and should look a lot better than the wooden fence. Should we ever decide to use that space for dairy goats, the dual-element hedgerow will constitute a real barrier to the animals, while looking pretty and offering some browse. So far our hedgerow plantings include rugosa roses, Siberian peashrub, cornelian cherry, a dwarf willow tree, and a golden elderberry. It's likely that our black raspberry patch, which sort of backs into the property line, will become a hedgerow element too. I have three tiny hazels and a ginseng plant that will be coddled for another year or two in containers before being added to the hedgerow. We lucked out with the goat panels, finding them used for a small fraction of the price for new ones, which is considerable. Right now a picture of the hedge project wouldn't really show much. I'm hoping that by late summer or fall a second picture will provide an impressive contrast. We'll see how it goes.

We also planted several new fruit trees, bushes and vines this month. We're starting both table grapes and hardy kiwis on trellises, and experimenting with a new growing technique for several fruit trees. The technique is called Backyard Orchard Culture. The good folk at Root Simple blog wrote about it, and you can check out a summary at the website of the tree nursery which developed it. Basically the idea is to cram normal fruit trees into places where they either won't have enough space to develop to their normal mature size, or where such full growth is undesirable. Then you radically prune the tree as it grows to keep it very small. Planting multiple fruit trees very close together is another part of BOC. Doing so forces the trees to compete for resources, which helps keep them small. While trees maintained in this manner will obviously never produce as much fruit as trees which realize their full growth, there are other advantages. Having many small fruit trees means you can have a succession of harvests that are each just large enough to keep you in fresh fruit for a fortnight or so, without providing any pressure to preserve the bulk of an enormous harvest. The six Asian pears and two extra apples we just planted in this way should (eventually) give us modest quantities of fresh fruit over a three-month span from mid-summer to early fall. (We'd ordered two more apples which would have extended the season through mid-fall at least, but they were sold out. We may add them next year.) Since BOC trees are kept very small, maintenance and harvesting are very easy. There's no need for ladders. I expect that when I'm another twenty or thirty years older, the ability to do such work with both feet on the ground will be very appealing.

We've got a few broiler chickens going already this year. My feeling is that last year we let our batch of six go far too long. I wanted to use up the second bag of feed that I'd purchased for them, and that meant letting most of them live for ten weeks. It gave us bigger birds, certainly. But it also meant that by the end I had to move the birds three times per day just to keep them out of their own filth. The Cornish cross breed that accounts for the vast majority of chicken meat in this country isn't genetically modified, but judging by how fast they grow, they may as well be. At nine and ten weeks of age, even broilers that were kept on grass, not fed for 24 hours per day, and allowed plenty of space to move around, pretty much couldn't and didn't. The speed at which these birds grow is an undeniable advantage for those who want to fly under the radar with backyard meat production. You can finish the birds before anyone notices they're there. But it's pretty much their only virtue. This year I'll raise two batches of four birds each, and only until each batch finishes off an 80-pound bag of feed. I expect that to mean slaughter at roughly seven weeks old. Thus smaller birds, but more of them as compared with last year.

Finally, we've just started work on a tiny frog pond to be added to the center of our garden. This is the only suitable spot we could find for it - one that's not on a footpath or directly under a large deciduous tree that will dump too many leaves into it in autumn. Work sort of stalled with this after the hole was dug, as mild weather brought on many spring tasks very early. But I want to get this done soonish, so that it can provide many benefits to our growing space this year. I know for a certainty that adding a bit of water to the garden will bring a great deal of additional biodiversity, which can only be a good thing. What I'm really hoping for though are some toads, which are supposed to be fantastic for slug control. The lasagna mulching method I'm so fond of does tend to encourage slugs, though we've had such dry conditions the last couple years that it's sort of been a wash. The plan is to stock the pond with duckweed for multiple uses, and probably a few goldfish for algae management. If frogs or toads don't show up on their own, I may go looking for some tadpoles. I know where to find some of these locally in the correct season, but I'm pretty sure that window has closed for the year.

Hope spring is treating you all well. Drop me a line and let me know what's new with you and your garden.

12 comments:

It's really good to hear from you! I have missed your posts. I'd read your comments on some other blogs, so knew you were still around.

Digging a pond is still on my list of things to do; a bit of nature for the children (my son would spend most of his days laying on his front poking around in a pool given half the chance) and attract more frogs and toads.

Otherwise, I've replaced a few chickens, ordered a couple of runner ducks for the summer, got my allotment mojo back and done some major weeding there.

The small fruit trees I planted last year are flowering well, and I have plans to squeeze in a sweet cherry in a corner between a water butt and a south facing house wall. I'm a bit worried it may be too dry, but water will be convenient and with pruning like you mention I don't think it will be too cramped.

DH made a second raised bed to grow salad and other things I don't want to have to traipse to and fro the allotment for. Mostly filled through lasagne mulching and some free manure; planning to finish it off with some municipal compost tomorrow.

Look forward to seeing some photos of you new chicken coop (no pressure!)

Welcome back Kate. You were missed. I've walked in your shoes. Things will get better because you planned in advance. Looking forward to more posts; don't forget this years PASA update. Take care. Marion

Hello! Wonderful to hear from you! Congrats on paying off the mortgage - that's a huge accomplishment, and just in time, sounds like. The home farm sounds fantastic - I planted five apples like this last year, but it looks like we'll move before they will bear.

Thank you so much for writing your blog. I enjoy reading about other people pursuing goals similar to min. I have a 1/4 acre and made some significant additions already this year. I planted grapes and hardy kiwi as well. And I just put in 4 new apple trees. Two years ago I planted cherries, pluot, plum, and peaches. I would have had some peaches last year but the tornado blew them all away last spring. Everything's fruiting this year, except the new apple trees of course. I do a big garden too. I mostly try to apply permaculture principles with my growing. I get great results and don't have too work too hard at it!

We have come to the same conclusion with the cornish cross meat birds. Butcher by 8 weeks at the latest - they continue to behave like happy chickens to that point, but after that they do nothing but eat and poop. Besides, how big a chicken do you want, anyway? Many of our 8-week olds were 7 lbs. dressed.

We all have our own systems of husband husbandry, and I'd suggest the assignment of time-consuming, difficult jobs to your newly retired one in order to give you time to write. We, your readers, will be grateful.

I like the fruit tree system, and will now stop worrying about whether I planted our second fig tree too close to the first one.

I was embarrassingly excited to see this post this morning: thank you for writing!

I'm all for the crowded orchard strategy (having plonked forty or so fruit trees into an eighth of an acre (which also includes a house and a stupid amount of driveway). It helps that here in Australia my number one climate problem for growing annual veg is too much Summer sun, so the shade will be very welcome when these trees are bigger.

Its wonderful to see you back, as your blog and El's Fast Grow the Weeds are my main inspiration. this city girl finally bought the 10 acres out in the country and we have so much to do we can't keep up with it all. We finally got the last of our nursery order in the ground and then our conservation department order arrived today. i'm embarrassed to say how many trees we have yet to plant, but I am proud of the 40 or so we have now in the ground.

Glad to hear from you. As for the solitude to write, I get it. And I get up before the rest of the family is awake. If I know I might be interrupted by phones, conversations, doorbells (and the attendant barking house dogs) I don't get nearly as much done.

Congratulations on being debt-free! A remarkable achievement. Though a not-hoped for early retirement must be difficult, with your cleverness and resilience, I look forward to seeing what new ideas and opportunites come out of all this.

That is, if your husband doesn't drive you crazy and get under you feet first (my husband works out of our home and seriously, I could whack him with a shovel somedays...in the nicest possible way of course!)

About me

I live on a 2/3 acre homestead in a residential neighborhood. A major goal is to demonstrate how much food a non-expert can produce in my particular climate and hardiness zone, with the soils native to my immediate area. We have gardens of annual and perennial plants, keep laying hens and honey bees, and regularly bite off more than we can chew. Another major goal is to pay off our mortgage as fast as possible. Here I blog about frugality, self-reliance, gardening, cooking and baking, food preservation, practical skills, half-baked experiments, and preparing to thrive in a lower-energy future.